Adriano

"Built beginning around 520 B.C., the city was a showcase for the empire's staggering wealth, with grand architecture, extravagant works of silver and gold, and extensive relief sculptures such as this one portraying envoys with offerings for the king. The height of Persian rule lasted from about 550 B.C. until 330 B.C., when Alexander the Great overthrew the ruling Archaemenid dynasty and burned Persepolis to the ground." - Adriano

via @atalanta1 \\ I had to look up the direct link http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf... since the photo was so strong and vivid -- as a reminder of how grand dynasties just come and go... - Adriano

"A system does tend toward disorder, which is the lowest "energy state" of the system, so how could evolution go in the other direction? It's because the Sun is always injecting new energy into the system, and it does it in a way that is harnessed by biochemistry and the ecosystem. The Earth is an open system, not a closed one. New energy in the form of sunlight is the first step of an "energy gradient" that flows through the ecosystem of life at multiple levels. This energy gradient drives the biochemistry of evolution: sunlight -> photosynthesis -> ATP production -> complex molecule construction -> food -> growth and reproduction (+ mutation) -> evolution. If the Sun were to "turn off" tomorrow, then evolution would come to a stop and life on earth would freeze over and decay into a lifeless rock." --Paul King - Adriano

... a bullet pass :-) - Adriano

"A 1,000-year-old Buddhist statue discovered in Tibet by Nazis searching for the origins of the Aryan race was hewn from meteorite. The "Iron Man" statue, which bears a swastika on its chest, was brought back to Germany in 1938 after being found in Tibet by a team of SS members led by zoologist Ernst Schäfer. The expedition was backed by Heinrich Himmler, the SS chief, who believed that the secret origin of the entire Aryan race could be uncovered in Tibet. Now the first scientific study of the statue's origins by experts from Stuttgart University has found that it is made of ataxite, a rare type of iron meteorite with a high nickel content. Experts concluded it had been chiselled from a remnant of the Chinga meteorite which fell to Earth near the border of Mongolia and Siberia 15,000 years ago. The 10 kg statue, believed have originated from the 11th century Bon culture, depicts the god Vaisravana, the Buddhist King of the North, known in Tibet as Jambhala." - Adriano

"Swastikas remain widely used in Indian religions, specifically in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, primarily as a tantric symbol to evoke shakti or the sacred symbol of auspiciousness. The word "swastika" comes from the Sanskrit svastika - "su" meaning "good," "asti" meaning "to be," and "ka" as a suffix. The swastika literally means "to be good". Or another translation can be made: "swa" is "higher self", "asti" meaning "being", and "ka" as a suffix, so the translation can be interpreted as "being with higher self"." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Adriano

"Seven rent-to-own companies and a software maker are settling charges with the Federal Trade Commission that rental computers illegally used spyware that took “pictures of children, individuals not fully clothed, and couples engaged in sexual activities.” The FTC slapped the hand of DesignerWare of North East Pennsylvania and the rent-to-own companies. The settlement only requires them to halt using their spy tools, which has been employed on as many as 420,000 rentals. The software, known as Detective Mode, didn’t just secretly turn on webcams. It “can log the keystrokes of the computer user, take screen shots of the computer user’s activities on the computer, and photograph anyone within view of the computer’s webcam. Detective Mode secretly gathers this information and transmits it to DesignerWare, who then transmits it to the rent-to-own store from which the computer was rented, unbeknownst to the individual using the computer." - Adriano

"German chemist Friedrich August Kekulé published a paper in French suggesting that the structure contained a six-membered ring of carbon atoms with alternating single and double bonds. Kekulé used evidence that there always appeared to be only one isomer of any monoderivative of benzene, and that there always appeared to be exactly three isomers of every diderivative—now understood to correspond to the ortho, meta, and para patterns of arene substitution—to argue in support of his proposed structure. Kekulé's symmetrical ring could explain these curious facts, as well as benzene's 1:1 carbon-hydrogen ratio. In 1890 the German Chemical Society organized a celebration of the 25th anniversary of his first benzene paper; Kekulé said that he had discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a reverie or day-dream of a snake seizing its own tail." - Adriano

RT @alaindebotton: We'll never avoid sadness because we inevitably get our doses of hope wrong. \\ Positive remedies: http://www.quora.com/Time-Ma... \\ BTW, the hex code for packaging jewels at Tiffany's is 60DFE5 -- but apparently it's protected as a color trademark, and thus it is not in the Pantone Colour system books. - Adriano

Less expectations, less disappointment. - Amira

imagine, all this time this painting was at Eric Clapton's place :-) Now imagine Ginger Baker's collection. - Adriano

"This book is an attempt to approach to the problem of paradoxes from within the reference of Theravada Buddhism. In 1970 Dr. Burns spent nine months in meditation practice. For over seven months of this period he was a monk and a disciple of the Venerable Ajahn Chah. The spirit of logical analysis combined with introspective awareness is reflected in this present writing. His other main Buddhist works are Buddhism and Depth Psychology and Nirvana, Nihilism and Satori. In 1977 Dr Burns mysteriously disappeared while exploring a national park in the south of Thailand. He was in his mid thirties at that time." - Adriano

"For more than half a century, Magnum photographers showed us the importance of picturing the human condition alongside reporting the news. An unintended consequence of their success has been to reduce news stories to a strikingly similar set of images: brave soldiers, weeping mothers, hungry refugees, election candidates reaching for a wall of hands. With the decline of the press and its demand for relevance, we have lost the tension between good and good-enough-to-show-the-world. When there were fewer photographers, Magnum admitted only the best to its club, and we trusted it to be our gatekeeper. Now we live in a world without Life magazine, but with too many pictures. What form of photojournalist will emerge from these conditions? Who can make images for the digital world that will show us something we can't see without them?" - Adriano

"Recently while on a dive near Amami Oshima in Japan, Ookata spotted rippling geometric sand patterns nearly six feet in diameter almost 80 feet below sea level. The artist is a small puffer fish only a few inches in length that swims tirelessly through the day and night to create these vast organic sculptures using the gesture of a single fin. The circles serve a variety of crucial ecological functions, the most important of which is to attract mates. The female fish is attracted to the hills and valleys within the sand and traverse them carefully to discover the male fish where the pair eventually lay eggs at the circle’s center, the grooves later acting as a natural buffer to ocean currents that protect the delicate offspring. Scientists learned that the more ridges contained within the sculpture resulted in a much greater likelihood of the fish pairing." - Adriano

WHOA! - AJ Batac

anyone know how such local micro-actions can result in a large macro pattern of such symmetry and beauty, i.e. what kind of "blueprint" did that tiny fish access? (Please don't say scaley fractal rules :-) - Adriano

[this was really a random find on Youtube...] So surprising the extend to which a woman's face can be a canvas incorporating illusions -- I've been so unaware of such techniques :-) what, a Kabuki brush? - Adriano

actually my interest here is in eigenfaces and machine learning prediction :-) see this post re: Data-Driven Enhancement of Facial Attractiveness http://www.quora.com/Face-Re... - Adriano

excellent animation by RSA... based on Ariely's lecture from his 2012 book _The Honest Truth about Dishonesty_. - Adriano

given the recent FF blackout, this is a response to the discussion, "In case Friendfeed goes away again but never comes back, where do we go?" http://friendfeed.com/zeigen... \\ We can post, comment, and stay in touch via Quora. Plus there are some other interesting topics there as well :-) Join friendfeeders: http://www.quora.com/friendf... - Adriano

"The Sachs Wolfe effect states that light from the cosmic microwave background—radiation present throughout the universe that was created by the Big Bang—would become more blue in color as it passed through the gravitational fields of lumps of matter. This effect was later used as a test for dark energy when scientists realized that they could compare that radiation’s temperature throughout our local universe with maps of where galaxies are located. If dark energy existed, their calculations showed, the maps should correspond, with the radiation's temperature being dependent on the location of galaxies. That is exactly what they found." New analysis rules out contamination in the data: http://goo.gl/zwXEd - Adriano

an Instagram soon... "The phone box-sized Dark Energy CAMERA or DECam is mounted on the 4m Victor Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile's Atacama desert. DECam is particularly sensitive to red and infrared light, to better study cosmic objects as distant as eight billion light-years away. The Dark Energy Survey's 570-million-pixel camera will scan some 300 million galaxies in the coming five years." http://www.bbc.co.uk/news... - Adriano

If you are not familar with this absolutely beautiful piece, find a very quiet moment, then listen to the entire composition: http://youtu.be/8as_BN5h5YQ *before* the masterclass. Pärt does his best to explain how he goes beyond just the simple notes to play the harmonics within the silence. There's no notation which will truly convey the composer's intentions. \\ Episode from "24 preludes for a Fugue." - Adriano

...and scores are here http://www.sheetmusicpiano.net/7972... :-) - Amira

his album _Alina_ (1999, ECM), which includes violincello/piano pieces, is one of my all-time favorites. - Adriano

Genetic algorithms and stochastic processes on Boolean functions can help us to better understand certain aspects of evolution and population theory. Papadimitriou also surprisingly points out why GA is usually not the most superior in optimization problems (cf. "asexual" algorithms like simulated annealing). Keyword: #mixability \\ Tip: start at 18m00s to skip basics on evolution. - Adriano

"The book unwittingly came to light when a Chinese monk clearing sand from a Buddhist meditation cave in 1900 noticed a crack in a wall. It suggested the outline of a doorway. Plastered over and painted, the entrance had been deliberately concealed. The monk, Abbot Wang Yuanlu, broke in and discovered a small chamber, about nine feet square and full from floor to ceiling with scrolls. They had been hidden and perfectly preserved in the dark, dry grotto for 1,000 years. Although he didn't know it, among the nearly 60,000 scrolls was the Diamond Sutra of 868 A.D., a woodblock printed scroll, more than 16 feet long, complete and dated, with an instruction that it be given away for free. And it was printed on paper, a material unknown in the West for another couple centuries. Ironically, this enduring scroll, with its illustrated frontispiece depicting the Buddha teaching his disciples, is about impermanence. The Diamond Sutra distils Buddhism's central belief that all is change." - Adriano

"Not eating for 12-16 hours can help people quickly reset their sleep-wake cycle, according to a study from the Harvard Medical School. This discovery can drastically improve a person's ability to cope with jet lag or adjust to working late shifts. Scientists have long known that our circadian rhythm is regulated by our exposure to light. Now they have found a second "food clock" that takes over when we are hungry. This mechanism probably evolved to make sure starving mammals don't go to sleep when they should be foraging for food. Lead researcher Clifford Saper explains: "The neat thing about this second clock is that it can override the main clock... and you should just flip into that new time zone in one day." It usually takes people a week to fully adjust to a new time zone or sleeping schedule. So if you are traveling from Los Angeles to Tokyo, figure out when breakfast is served in Tokyo, and don't eat for the 12-16 hours before Tokyo's breakfast time." PubMed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed... - Adriano

Weird Tips to Help You Fall Asleep: white/brown noise \\ Curl your toes, hold for a few seconds, then uncurl. Repeat this movement to help relax your mind and body. http://thesecretyumiverse.wond... - Adriano

"We all laugh at how the managers in Dilbert or on the The Office constantly spew cliches that don’t seem to mean anything. But those parodies shed light on a basic truth: some tired management cliches will impress enough people that they’ll probably help you get promoted to middle management. Of course, if you really become a samurai master of using all 89 of these cliches, you probably have no hope of moving up to upper management, because your mind and vocabulary will be filled with complete and utter nonsense. Then again, for those of you who are believers in the “fake it until you make it” approach to career progression, maybe your self-mastery of these cliches will baffle your bosses so much that, eventually, they’ll let you into the inner sanctum of senior management." - Adriano

there are some magnificent oceanic ones also... - Adriano

"Model accurately explains why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The primary determinant was soaring food prices... a threshold for global food prices, if breached, would lead to worldwide unrest. Whenever the UN’s food price index climbs above 210, the conditions ripen for social unrest around the world. CSI doesn’t claim that any breach of 210 immediately leads to riots, obviously; just that the probability that riots will erupt grows much greater. For billions of people around the world, food comprises up to 80% of routine expenses. When prices jump, people can’t afford anything else; or even food itself. And if you can’t eat—or worse, your family can’t eat—you fight." http://goo.gl/3WNPm - Adriano

added kicker: "Because of climate change-exacerbated disasters “the average price of staple foods such as maize could more than double in the next 20 years compared with 2010 trend prices,” a new report from Oxfam reveals. That report details how the poor will be even more vulnerable to climate change-induced food price shocks than previously thought. After all, we’ve “loaded the climate dice,” as NASA’s James Hansen likes to say." \\ Oxfam: Extreme Weather, Extreme Food Prices http://goo.gl/fngkm - Adriano

FAO Food Price Index dataset via Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: http://www.fao.org/worldfo... - Adriano

World map fish tank lets your fish travel around the world. \\ Map made of world currencies. - Adriano

"In M.C. Escher’s engraving “Ants”, a procession of ants is presented performing a potentially perpetual march upon a Möbius-like strip, a one-sided surface produced by twisting and joining the ends of a strip or ribbon. In a number of other engravings, Escher toyed with infinity by employing several variations of the same idea, twisted ribbons implying an endless route. The German graphic artist Max Bill (1908-1994) was similarly inspired by this representation and in his aptly titled sculpture “Endless Ribbon” made an elegant comment on the twisted ribbon as a symbol of infinity." - Adriano

sell the fear... ever seen this bumper sticker? "It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber." - Adriano

"Paul Buchheit, a Y.C. partner, points out that in Y.C.’s portfolio “the number one company is worth more than [the] next 199 companies combined, while number two is worth more than [the] next 198 combined, and so on.” One could say that the outliers—Dropbox and Airbnb—are the only ones that matter to the Y.C. fund. Perhaps it would be better to say that Y.C. is in the hits business, and uncertainty about which start-up will become the one monstrous hit benefits many founders who are funded. Graham and the other Y.C. partners tell the founders that start-ups fail only when founders give up. It is not necessarily in the interest of founders to follow that advice indefinitely, however." - Adriano

"We have developed a novel experimental platform, referred to as a substitutional reality (SR) system, for studying the conviction of the perception of live reality and related metacognitive functions. The SR system was designed to manipulate people's reality by allowing them to experience live scenes (in which they were physically present) and recorded scenes (which were recorded and edited in advance) in an alternating manner without noticing a reality gap. All of the naïve participants (n = 21) successfully believed that they had experienced live scenes when recorded scenes had been presented. Additional psychophysical experiments suggest the depth of visual objects does not affect the perceptual discriminability between scenes, and the scene switch during head movement enhance substitutional performance. The SR system, with its reality manipulation, is a novel and affordable method for studying metacognitive functions and psychiatric disorders." - Adriano

"If grammatical structure cannot be learned, it must be innate. But different languages have different grammars. So whatever is innate has to be highly abstract -- a Universal Grammar. And the problem is then to explain how children get from this abstract knowledge to the specific language they are learning. The field became encumbered by creative but highly implausible theories, most notably the parameter-setting account, which conceptualised language acquisition as a process of "setting a switch" for a number of innately-determined parameters. Evidence that children’s grammars actually changed in discrete steps, as each parameter became set, was lacking. Reality was much messier. [S]tatistical learning and connectionism were not given serious consideration by Chomsky; they were rapidly dismissed as versions of behaviourism that can’t possibly explain language acquisition." - Adriano

Auditory perception at the root of language learning (2012): infants as young as three months of age are able to automatically detect and learn complex dependencies between syllables in spoken language -- by contrast, adults only recognized the same dependencies when asked to actively search for them. http://www.pnas.org/content... - Adriano

"Out on the playa of Nevada's Black Rock Desert, more than 50,000 participants gathered last week to form Black Rock City, a temporary city that became the home of the 26th annual Burning Man Festival. Every year, participants from around the world descend on the playa -- performers, artists, free spirits, and more -- to form a self-reliant community, to dance, to express themselves and take in the spectacle of the festival." - Adriano

must see, absolutely amazing ! "Wiltshire takes a helicopter journey over Rome and then draws a panoramic view of what he saw, entirely from memory. [H]e drew it in such great detail that he drew the exact number of columns in the Pantheon." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Adriano

"Dudely Lama: “Life is short and complicated and nobody knows what to do about it. So don’t do anything about it. Just take it easy, man. Stop worrying so much whether you’ll make it into the finals. Kick back with some friends and some oat soda and whether you roll strikes or gutters, do your best to be true to yourself and others – that is to say, abide.” Knowing that, now you can die with a smile on your face without feelin’ like the Good Lord gypped you. And that’s what Dudeism’s all about. See ya later on down the trail." - Adriano